Helen Thomas, "America at War? A Conversation” - MIT Communications Forum

KHOURY: Good evening and welcome. My name is Philip Khoury I'm the Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences here at MIT and I'm a professor of history. It's a privilege to introduce this event, which is titled America at War, a conversation with Helen Thomas. Our sponsor is the Communications Forum at MIT and I've been asked just to make one brief announcement before we proceed.

And that is, this Wednesday at 5:00 PM in this room in Bartos Theater there will be the third Communications Forum Forum, the third fora, if you like, OK, on copyright. And the two featured speakers are Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard and Siva Vaidhyanathan at NYU. And we urge you to come out for this. I gather it's been a very successful couple of forums so far.

Now, for more than four decades with pen and paper in hand, Helen Thomas has occupied a front row seat in a theater where the principal cast and the plot changed every four years, or occasionally every eight. As a young writer, she began covering a newly elected president in November, 1960. And then marked the transition from his administration to the subsequent one after his assassination.

She has monitored presidential political and military policies relating to conflicts from Vietnam to the former Soviet Union to Israel to the Falklands to Libya and to Iraq. She has written about political scandals that have involved wiretapping, arms sales to rouge militants, and love affairs with interns. She sits now--

I knew that would go down well, Alex. OK, she sits now pen still at the ready, offering commentary on measures being taken to stimulate our languishing economy, on policies that bear on our role in Iraq, and on the dozens of issues that will emerge as the dominoes tumble after tomorrow's midterm elections. Indeed, as a member of the White House Press Corps since 1960, Helen Thomas has been reporting important national and international stories in which nine US presidents have played the lead.

She is a legend in her own time, which means she is someone who refuses to live off her many laurels by remaining as active and as engaged as ever with her profession of journalism. On behalf of all of us, Helen, I am honored to welcome you to MIT. I know this is your first visit. And I will confess that I knew her as a little boy. She wasn't much older than me then.

So it's a wonderful reunion for me. As a longtime eyewitness to history, Helen's perspectives on politics and the state of the free press are even more relevant and valuable today and they will be tomorrow. Certainly as reporters and as participants in public debates about democracy, about civil liberties, about foreign policy, Helen Thomas and her colleagues in the media serve an important role in helping us to understand what's happening on the political stage, to explore alternative points of view, and to decide what we, as participants in a democratic society, should do, ought to do.

Such an important role doesn't come without scrutiny however, as we have come to question the press as much if not more than the players it covers. What responsibility and accountability do the media have to the citizens they serve? What is the media's responsibility to the individuals, organizations, and institutions it covers?

Helen will address these questions in relation to our current situation in Iraq, spotlighting the role of the free press to both question and to endorse. And she'll explain how the two have become either too entwined at times, spin becomes news, or entirely polarized, that paper's too liberal or that one's too conservative.

Following Helen's remarks, we will turn to our two respondents Charles Stewart on my far right, always on my far right.

[LAUGHTER]

And David Thorburn. David very kindly has agreed to step forward on very short notice to replace Henry Jenkins, who has been called away quite suddenly and regrets that he cannot be here. Has a personal issue that he had to deal with out of town.

Charles Stewart is Professor of Political Science at MIT and Associate Dean of our school. He also happens to be one of this country's leading scholars of American politics and behavior. He'll offer a response emerging from his extensive research on the US Congress.

David is Professor of literature at MIT and he's of course a director of the Communications Forum and has been for a good long while now, our sponsor today. David is a media studies expert and is one of the pioneers of television studies in the United States. And I want to add that both David Thorburn and Charles Stewart hold the highest honor we have in the teaching world at MIT. Both are MacVicar Faculty Fellows. There is no higher honor in my opinion at this institution.

We're ready to begin. We're going to begin with our featured speaker, Helen Thomas. Welcome, Helen.

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THOMAS: Well, it's always hard to hear your obituary, but I have never had done more intellectually. And as for the questions, I'm going to leave that to the experts. Good afternoon or is it evening? I'm very honored to be here. But I must admit, when I told my friends that I was going to MIT, they said, why? You can't add two and two, and there you'll be with all those Nobels and future Einsteins.

But I did come on the eve, eve of the midterm elections. And I don't have any of those answers either. My crystal ball is murky, short of predictions, but long on hopes that the Democrats will keep control of the Senate. It is up for grabs. They have only one seat in the majority now.

Otherwise, you can be sure it will be bombs away. I can say that now because I write an opinion column. When I worked for UPI wire service, I had to stick to the facts. And now I'm allowed to have an opinion. Forgive everyone. Free at last.

And now I wake up in the morning and I say to myself, who do I hate today? And that's the way you write a column. When I wrote my first column, the editor said, where's the edge? Said the what? Your opinion? My what? After 50 years of censoring myself, anyway it's fun.

Well, I never beat around the bush, excuse the pun. I hate war. Besides I've lived long enough to see so many of our reviled enemies become our friends. So maybe there is a better way instead of the killing fields.

I've never covered a president before in all my years in Washington who actually wanted to go to war, first resort, not the end of diplomacy, not the end of talk, not the end of negotiations. Others would go of course. But in this case, it's the first resort.

Iraq has been on President Bush's radar since he came into office and even before. Whenever it seems that he may be easing up his cordon of hawk and hard line advisors rein him in. Not that he is not obsessed. Saddam Hussein is his white whale.

It's more than that. He and his cohorts are pursuing a policy that is alien to all that we've ever stood for since World War II, at least in terms of collective security, containment, peaceful diplomacy, peaceful negotiations. The Bush policy of preemptive war is immoral. Historian Arthur Schlesinger--

[APPLAUSE]

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, thank you, put it well. He said that such a policy would legitimatize Pearl Harbor. But he has given a green light, President Bush has been given a green light from Congress. So it's once more into the breach with none of the lessons learned since Vietnam.

Sure, we'll win that war. Bomb the Iraqis who are left. Bomb them into democracy. No other country is really with us on this. Tony Blair is apparently not speaking for the British people on this one.

The Air Force has been doing practice runs in southern Iraq. And do I dare to assume that it is hoped that some Iraqi will be full up foolhardy enough to give Bush an excuse for the war that he longs for. Where are the peacemakers?

I thought we had to retaliate in Afghanistan. But perpetual war, war without end, is hardly what anyone would want to look forward to for their children, for their children, their grandchildren. What a way to begin the 21st century. And we thought that we were going to live happily ever after when the Cold War ended.

I have to admit the Bushites have played the war card well. The economy, prescription drugs, other domestic issues have been pushed aside. Rightfully so, because clearly they have no answers. But woe be on this country if Bush actually gets a Republican Senate and House.

Start drilling oil in Alaska. Forget Enron and the corporate greed. Give those hungry Wall Street investors a cut in the Social Security benefits. Well I say cry, the beloved country. We have arrived at a stage where there are no ideals, no inspiration, no hope. It's not only a swing to the right, it's a big slide away from the values and principles that have made this country so great.

We have seen Americans too willing to give up their freedom for security Big Brother style Darkness at Noon as well as Orwell. It's odd for me to quote Bob Barr, the conservative Congressman, Barr, sorry. Who said that the real test of freedom is not during periods of peace and prosperity, but in times of national crisis.

I must say I was surprised that some great Ivy League academic defenders of civil liberties were so willing to jump over to the other side when they felt that the country was threatened, and to be as vengeful as anyone else who has never asked why. The Attorney General had ruled that deportation cases should be closed to the public and the press.

Fed, up the Detroit papers finally sued and won a ruling to be able to cover some of these deportation hearings. And federal judge Damon Keith said, democracy dies behind closed doors. We are so willing to accept an unprovoked war as the United States builds up its forces in the Persian Gulf. Where is the outrage?

Preemptive war is not us, I maintain. At least it wasn't us in the 20th century. But we are being led to permanent, perpetual war by a man who did not choose to serve himself when he was about to be drafted for Vietnam and that goes for all of his hawk advisors.

I don't think that's a low blow. It's a truth It's not lost on the American people that President Bush is giving a pass to diplomatic talks, that is to North Korea, which admits it lied and has nuclear weapons in production or it wants to produce them, has a program. And we are going to bomb Iraq, which may have them someday. Does that make sense to you? Of course.

Or is it the oil that Iraq possesses? Anyone want to send their sons or grandchildren to die for a grab at Iraq's oil fields? Would we tolerate an attack on our nation that way? When are the American people are going to wake up? In the case of Afghanistan, I felt that the retribution was swift and right.

The question, to question, to question, to dissent, is not unpatriotic. It is patriotic to be a thinking people and not to roll over as Congress did for fear that they will not get re-elected without thinking of the consequences. We should be working for true arms control all over the world. We should uphold the treaties that we have made since World War II that are being torn up day by day, comprehensive test ban treaty, non-proliferation treaty, anti-ballistic missile treaty, and so forth, all the others that we signed since World War II.

We have even forgotten that we need friends and allies. We forgot that at least till 9/12. Then the president was never off the phone for three weeks calling everyone in the world, all the leaders in the world, lining them up. Colin Powell, Secretary of State was a lonesome dove. But he likes his job and there is no room in this administration for a devil's advocate.

President Bush has had only six news conferences in his two years in office. That's a long time between drinks. And that is playing it safe, but not consistent with true democracy. The presidential-- and he has his last news conference was on July 8. A lot has happened since then. The presidential news conference is the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned on a regular basis and held accountable.

Otherwise he can rule and is ruling now by executive order, autocratically, imperialistically. I maintain that is not us and not democracy. You cannot have a democracy without a free press, free to ask questions. It's indispensable in our system.

Well, what a difference a day makes. What a difference a year makes. We've had to tighten security like never before now that we know that we are vulnerable, not protected by two oceans. I know I sound like the bearer of bad news. Blame the messenger. We're used to that.

No question our world has been shaken, shattered maybe. But I am confident that we shall overcome. As Franklin D Roosevelt put it at the height of the Great Depression, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The philosopher George Santayana said, that if we do not learn from our mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them in the future.

It is ours to reason why, not just to do and die. We have to wake up, speak up, play a role in the decisions that affect all mankind. It's up to us to make our public servants accountable. We in the press are the self-appointed self-annointed watchdogs of democracy. We try to follow the truth wherever it leads us.

As long as I'm on my rant, I think we also have to protect our civil liberties. Benjamin Franklin said, if we are willing to give up our liberty for temporary security, we are in danger of losing both. I speak of wiretapping, indiscriminate, random, FBI accessing email, FBI listening in on private lawyer client conversations, rounding up dark skinned immigrants who have no appeal, no due process.

Some 700 detainees at Guantanamo Bay held in limbo, unable to contact any member of their family or a lawyer, of course. They are prisoners of war, captured in Afghanistan, denied rights under international law and the Geneva Accords. That's not us. The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul.

Sabotage the biological chemical weapons treaty. We have opposed the criminal court and so forth. We're going to put nuclear weapons in our last sanctuary, the heavens. Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been invented.

And I like what Adlai Stevenson said. Stevenson said, democracy is great, not just because the majority prevails, but because it's safe to be in the minority. It's also said that the only way for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

I shall never forget the Martin Luther King march on Washington in 1963 when he made his immortal speech I have a dream, black and white kids walking hand-in-hand together. But I also remember the rabbi who had spent many years in a concentration camp in the Hitler regime. And he said that the greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.

The French historian de Tocqueville spoke of America in its infancy and visited here. He said, America is great because it is good. When it ceases to be good, it will no longer be great. To me, great presidents have great goals for mankind. I believe that they have the greatest honor that can come to anyone. And that is the trust of the American people.

I've always felt greatly privileged to cover the White House and to have that ringside seat to instant history, history in the making. I've seen presidents in their highs and lows always aware that they are human beings, sometimes. I thought I'd give you a thumbnail sketch of the presidents I've covered. John F. Kennedy, most inspired of them all. Anyone who would say we're going to land men on the moon in a decade was either reading science fiction or obviously had that vision thing.

He said, there's a universe out there that we must explore. He was a statesman at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He avoided a nuclear holocaust. Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society helped the poor, the sick, and the maimed. He rammed through Congress in his first two years in office on the tailwind of the Kennedy assassination. Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, voting rights for blacks for the first time in the South, where they didn't have to recite the US Constitution or pay a poll tax to register to vote, public housing, federal aid to education at all levels from Head Start through college, you name it.

But of course, Vietnam was his denouement. Like most presidents, Johnson had a stable of speechwriters. And once he once asked that a certain speech be prepared. And when the speechwriter writer brought him the first draft he looked at it and he said, Voltaire? Voltaire? People I'm going to talk to don't know who Voltaire is.

Grabbed a pen scratched shout Voltaire and scribbled in, as my dear old daddy used to say. And when he was pushing civil rights, a group of his Southern cronies, he had been Senate majority leader came to him and said Lyndon, what is this? When you were in the Senate, you were a Southerner.

And he said, I'm president now, president of all the people. He knew every man's price on Capitol Hill. And he knew where all the bodies were buried.

Richard Nixon, brilliant politician, who always had two roads to go and he always took the wrong road. He will be remembered for the breakthrough trip to China in 1972, which began the normalization of relations between the US and China after a 20 year hiatus, 20 year gap. And he will be remembered as the only president in our history to be forced to resign because of the abuse of government power. His dark side always prevailed.

Gerald Ford restored confidence in the White House and in the country in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. He said, the long nightmare is over. Jimmy Carter put human rights at the centerpiece of his foreign policy. He also is the most respected past president of recent times and hats off that he won the Nobel Peace Prize finally, after being nominated 10 times.

Ronald Reagan moved the country to the right. There was a Reagan Revolution. He also abetted the end of the Cold War with a tremendous arms buildup. George Bush 41, best known for the Persian Gulf War victory. But we couldn't read his lips when it came to the economy.

Bill Clinton tarnished the Oval Office with his personal liaisons. But he did bring prosperity to the country, balanced the budget. He worked for world peace in the Balkans, Ireland, Middle East. And when he was getting ready to leave office of course, all the White House reporters wanted to interview him. And we all had the pro forma questions.

Will you write your memoirs? What will your legacy Be but I think I asked him one prophetic question. I said to him, Mr. President, if you could take one thing from the White House that belongs to the American people, what would it be? Well, I didn't know he was going to bring a U-Haul.

He said it would be the moon rock, which was brought back by Neil Armstrong, first man to land on the moon. And he said that whenever his staff were in high tension, at each other's throats, he would tell them to chill out and point to the moon rock and note that it's 3.6 billion years old. And that's what we call perspective.

George W. Bush, 43, a work in progress. He has raised more than $125 million for the Republican candidates. His cordon of advisors I've told you are all hard liners. He likes being president, no sweat. He asked for advice on one page.

Presidency has always been on the job training, so we'll forgive him. His philosophy is simple, black and white, good and evil, dead or alive, with us or against us, except when it comes to the transgressions of the greedy corporate world. And then he says, you really can't reduce this problem to black and white.

I went to Washington during World War II determine to be a newspaperwoman. Had just gotten out of college. And Liz Carpenter who also became a great-- she became a great Texas newspaperwoman and later press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, arrived at the same time. She had just graduated from the University of Texas.

And we both went knocking on doors at the National Press Building. And Liz was always on the plump side. And she ran out of money a couple of days before I did. And she wired her brother, please send me $200 or I'm going to have to sell my body. And he wired back, sell it by the pound. All

The first ladies I covered rose to the occasion. They found out that they had great power and they could wave a magic wand in support of a good social cause. And many supported their crusades long after they left the White House. And Mrs. Johnson's, of course, was known for her national beautification program, which transformed this land we love.

And she has created a Wildflower Center outside of Austin. And a teacher took a group of her school children one day to visit the Center. And she held up a photograph of Lady Bird Johnson and asked the kids, do you know who she is? And one little boy piped up, that's Mother Nature

Of course, the White House is always under scrutiny. And somehow presidents seem to think they can have their privacy. My feeling is, if they want their privacy and that's the issue, don't go into public life I also think that if you really want to go into public life, you should decide at the age of five and live accordingly.

When I was first assigned to cover President hyphen Elect Jimmy Carter, I thought of that interview he had given to Playboy Magazine where he said he had lust in his heart. Well, little did I know that presidential lust would come much later. Instead I found myself covering a Sunday school teacher.

And when I tried to cover Carter's Bible class in Plains, Georgia, my male colleagues were allowed in. But I was blocked by a big, burly bouncer. I finally convinced him I was no lady, I was a reporter. Forgive us our press passes.

Well, no president has ever liked the press, dating back to George Washington. I wasn't covering him but Kennedy said, I'm reading more and enjoying it less. What LBJ said is unprintable. Nixon looked up when we walked into the Cabinet room one day and said, it's only coincidental that we're talking about pollution when the press walks in.

President Ford said that if God had created the world in six days. He could not have rested, he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas. Carter always seemed to be saying, Lord forgive them for they know not what they do. And when President Reagan was told that the Sandinistas, the Marxists, had fired on a press helicopter at the Honduran border, he quipped, there's some good in everyone.

And when a friend asked President Clinton why the press always went along in the motorcade when he went jogging, he laughed and said they just want to see if I drop dead. That's true. George Bush used to invite my-- George Bush I used to invite my younger colleagues to go jogging with him. Better them than me. I got invited to the dedication of the horseshoe pit.

Well, Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today said that when he went to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro a couple of years ago, he found that Castro was very clued in about America, happenings here. And he asked Castro, what's the difference between your country and mine. And Castro said, I don't have to answer questions from Helen Thomas.

Well as we start the 21st century, I think that we can look back on the last century in deepest gratitude to the millions who made the ultimate sacrifice for us, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam. At the same time, we also realize that we've made great strides in last century which have brought us great credit in terms of civil rights, women's rights, human rights, not to mention the high tech advances, robotics, and so forth.

We're going to Mars and so forth. And we know that our quest for knowledge should never end. I have many memories in covering the White House. There've been times to laugh, times to cry, and times to wonder. I remember when Kennedy said an off the cuff remark at a news conference, life is unfair.

And I remember when we asked him, what would happen if-- on Air Force One we asked him, what would happen if the aircraft crashed. I know one thing he said your name will be just a footnote. And I remember when we were invited to the LBJ ranch for dinner. And Johnson asked Bill Moyers, who had been a Baptist minister to say grace. Moyers bent his head, began to pray.

Johnson commanded, speak up, Bill. I wasn't talking to you, Mr. President, Moyers replied. And I remember when Johnson was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital for gallbladder surgery. The psychiatric ward had been transformed into a press room. What happened to the patients, Johnson asked Moyers. We gave them all press cards, said Moyers.

And then there was Mitch Costanza who said, I don't mind Carter being born again, but did he have to come back as himself? And I remember asking Billy Carter if he too had been born again. He said once is enough. Then there was my all time favorite, Miss Lillian, Carter's mother who said, sometimes when I look at my children, I wish I'd remained a virgin.

When Carter was elected president, a reporter ran up to Miss Lillian and said, aren't you proud of your son? She said, which one? I remember interviewing her during the Carter campaign. She was still fuming over a French woman correspondent who had belabored Carter's campaign promise never to lie.

She kept asking Miss Lillian what he really meant by that. Finally she said to Miss Lillian, do you lie? Miss Lillian said, well, I might tell a little white lie. Well, what do you mean by a little white lie? In total exasperation, Mr. Lillian said, you remember when you came through that door and I told you how beautiful you looked, well, that's a little white lie.

Several years ago on Christmas, in the Christmas season, the Washington Post said the General Colin Powell was going to become President Clinton's Secretary of State. Well, that's a little premature. That's what he is now. And I was invited to a Christmas party at Sam Donaldson's house. Powell was there.

In my usual shy way, I marched up to him and I said, General, are you going to be the next Secretary of State, to which you turned to another guest and said, isn't there some war we can send her to? Well before 9/11, he sent me a note saying, I'm still looking for that war. And I sent him back the Vietnam slogan, hell, no, I won't go.

And then there was Henry Kissinger. Woman ran up to Kissinger and said, oh, Dr. Kissinger, thank you for saving the world. He said, you're welcome. And once Kissinger teased his own Secret Service agents that he might be kidnapped by terrorists. They told him, don't worry we'll never let them take you alive.

And I remember going to Moscow with President Reagan for a summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. Suddenly, the evil empire was no more in Reagan's eyes. And he noted that the Russians laughed and they cried and they were human. When we got back to Washington, I said to him, Mr. president do you think if you had gone to Moscow 10 years ago, 20 years ago you might have found out the Russians laugh, they cry, they're human. They're not bears who walk like men. He said nope, they've changed.

Justice Brandeis said that if the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. He also said that a constant spotlight on public officials lessens the possibility of corruption. Lincoln said, let the people know the facts and the country will be safe. I believe that.

Jefferson said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Engraved in the Mantel in the State Dining Room it's a prayer by John Adams, which says, blessings on this house. May only good and wise men live here. We all hope for that. And I believe that people can handle the truth and they deserve no less. And we should keep an eye on presidents who have life and death power over all humanity today to keep our people informed, democracy alive, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

KHOURY: Thank you very much, Helen. We will now move on to-- David Thorburn has-- we work together. This is how it is David is elected to speak first in response.

THORBURN: Thank you. I won't even attempt to be as witty or as charming as Helen Thomas. But I would like to begin by giving you an examination, a test. It's a pop quiz. Among her many allusions and references, Helen Thomas made reference to a poem by Tennyson in her talk. Did anyone pick up on it ? What was it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

THORBURN: Yes. She spoke briefly. She said, ours is not to reason why. And of course she was referring to a very famous poem, which is deeply relevant to our discourse in some respects. And I thought I might begin by mentioning it to you

It's of course, the famous poem that Tennyson wrote after the catastrophe of a brigade of light cavalry being ordered in the Crimea War, being ordered to take charge into incredibly overwhelming cannon shot. It was a horrific military blunder, a mistake on a monumental scale to send light cavalry into the face of those guns.

And there was an elaborate investigation afterwards, and the great national act of mourning, commemoration, and self-flagellation in England after the event. And it was partly caused by the power of Tennyson's famous poem. In the poem he describes-- some of the power of the poem has to do with its astonishing rhythms.

But one of the lines in the poem goes something like this, cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell, boldly they rode and well into the valley of death rode the 600. 600 cavalryman rode into those cannon. Even as they began it, they knew that they were riding to their deaths.

I think a more sensible leader might have actually disobeyed orders and sent his men away from the front. But they were glad-- they were too honorable and too full of sort of a sense of pride that we have to obey our orders. And some of the lines in the poem talk about someone had blundered is one of the lines in the poem.

And one of the reasons that strikes me as relevant to our present situation is in some sense disturbing and eerie to me. Because one difference between our contemporary situation and the situation in the 19th century. I could imagine easily, and I think Helen Thomas's discourse implies, and an equally horrific and maybe even more shocking blunder if it's a pre-emptive strike by American forces on others.

But the difference of course as all of you are thinking I'm sure, is that our forces would be high in the air, free of danger. The civilian casualties are likely to be horrific. The cost, even if it's a horrific blunder, the cost will be to the enemy and the country responsible for the horror is likely not to feel it. Part of the danger of Bush, it strikes me part of the danger of what President Bush has been talking about, although perhaps less aggressively in recent days than at the beginning of his discourse about preemptive war, part of the danger of it is precisely that if we go down that road, we are much less likely immediately to feel the consequences of such behavior.

Horrible as it is, of the 600 members of the Light Brigade who charged into the mouth of hell, something over 400 of them were killed, a shocking, shocking casualty rate. But it was a wake up call to that society and to those people. In a way such wake up calls may be less available in a high tech environment in which war is conducted by digital technology and high flying airplanes and so-called smart bombs. So it strikes me as a relevant and disturbing imperfect analogy.

I also thought it was worth saying what I take it most of you felt. I think that Helen Thomas offered us a very powerful indictment of the current behavior of the Bush presidency, from which I certainly have no significant dissent. I think that the notion of preemptive war is as dubious and as vulnerable as Helen Thomas suggested. I think her comments about the implicit incoherence and inconsistency of the Bush policies are especially notable and worth recalling.

And also her reminder to us of the extraordinary danger to civil liberties in the country that has already begun to build because of the rhetoric of the Administration deserves I think underlining. But her most powerful-- but for me, the most powerful and disturbing aspect of her discourse, maybe it's that I don't expect that much from the collection of managers and oil company apologists who surround President Bush, the most shocking thing to me in some ways that Helen Thomas dwelled on a bit, mentioned a bit, and that I think we might want to talk more about in our conversation, has been the astonishing supineness of the Congress, the astonishing the absolutely astonishing, truly shocking cowardly behavior of most Democrats.

It is quite amazing that Helen Thomas in her in our talk today was 50 times more eloquent than almost any Democratic politician has been in public about the shocking inconsistency and folly of this Administration's behavior. Is the Democratic Congress so nervous about its ridiculous jobs that it is afraid to speak the truth in a moment like this? That strikes me as almost more shocking and more horrible.

Because they know better. Because they know-- at least Bush presumably believes what he's doing maybe. Perhaps believes what he's doing. In any case, some of the warmongers in his Administration, Richard Perle and the Secretary of Defense truly believe what they're doing, contemptible as those beliefs may be. There are many Democratic politicians who know perfectly well how shocking and inconsistent and morally dubious as well as politically impractical these plans are.

But they're silent about it. And it strikes me as in that sense a very, very depressing time supposedly for our democracy. Let me end with a little reminiscence of my own about the Vietnam era. And in this sense, I have at least one minorly optimistic thing to say to you in response to the kinds of thoughts that Helen Thomas's discourse generated in me.

I was very active, relatively active, in my graduate student days and in my days in my early days as a young professor in the anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam. And one of the most important things that I recall about that time, seems to me to lead to at least a partly optimistic conclusion after all the negative things that I've been saying and that Helen Thomas has said.

And that is that in the very early days of the anti-war movement in the United States during the Vietnam era in the early 1960s, in 1961, '62, 63; 63, the year of Kennedy's assassination when we began to send advisors to Vietnam. There was never in the beginning even any formal declaration of our involvement there, the amount of anti-war discourse in the larger population was relatively small.

You would never read an op ed piece in the New York Times questioning the motives of the war. And it was as late as 1965 or 1966 that the Secretary of State of the United States, Dean Rusk said there is no significant body of opinion in this country-- this is almost a direct quotation. I used it many times in my anti-war talks in the 1960s. No significant body of opinion, this bastard said. No significant body of opinion that United States is opposed to the war in Vietnam.

By the time he said that in 1965, many university campuses were hotbeds of anti-war activity. But the truth is that none of the anti-war activity in those early came from public sources either. So we weren't hearing from Congressmen. We weren't hearing from senators in those early days.

But it is still the case, I think, that in our present situation the prime difference that I see between those days and now is that even though the politicians are keeping their mouths shut and are behaving with I think contemptible cowardice and self-interest, probably mistaken self-interest, ordinary people are speaking out. There is more on the op ed pages. There's more on the talk shows and on radio.

There's more general fear and opposition to any proposal to invade Iraq bubbling in our society now than was remotely the case as late as 1965 or even 1966. And that's I think a positive moment. My guess is, my belief is, that if the Bush administration really is so foolish as to pursue some sort of a preemptive war, the amount of anti-war, the explosion of anti-war activity into the streets will be surprising to everyone except those of us who remember the Vietnam era and remember what can happen when an aroused citizenry begins to instruct its government about what constitutes reasonable behavior. At least that's what I hope will happen if Bush is so foolish as to go down that road.

THOMAS: That's wonderful.

[APPLAUSE]

STEWART: So this is two difficult acts to follow. Not only have we heard two very compelling views about the state of the world today, but I teach a freshman advising seminar, those of you, most people here are probably from MIT and know about these things, and I'm teaching about cooking, doing a cooking class actually this term. And about an hour and a half ago, we were making an eating won tons.

And I have a belly full of the right about there. And so I'm going to be looking down at my notes a little more than I would like, just to kind of get over the won ton problem, we shall call it.

THOMAS: Is he kidding?

STEWART: Only at MIT. But on my notes, I have kind of a feeling that the conversation would go this way. I want to say something that I think is ultimately in the spirit of what both Helen Thomas and David have said, but come at it is slightly different way. And actually suggest that in the politics of going to war with Iraq, perhaps going to war with Iraq, over the last couple of months there's been both this supine behavior.

But there's also been an interesting debate and an interesting dynamic in public opinion. And I'm curious about the degree to which this pattern might emerge going forward. And so let me kind of lay out my argument a bit, and kind of see where it goes. And I'm going to start off perhaps a bit, maybe even overly conventional and too political scienc-y but then come back to what I hope is the hopeful point here.

And so in any case, I mean going to war is a pretty awful thing. And Ms. Thomas mentioned in the beginning that there were lessons of Vietnam. And there's one lesson of Vietnam that I think we all understand, hawks and doves, and that is that a nation shouldn't be dragged into war without the public's approval. Another lesson that was learned within Washington at least and is less well understood is that well the president shouldn't go to war without Congress's approval.

And that's certainly what we witnessed in September was watching a president try to get Congress's approval. Of course, these two things go together. The public that the president wants to get the approval from is not a they, it's an it. And this public can't ask questions it can't speak with one voice. That's what Congress is there for.

And so these two things go together, getting Congress's approval and getting the public's approval go together. And during the months of September and October, we saw this dance between the president and the Congress over what precisely should Iraq policy be. And the interesting thing, of course, is that this is a society where secrets aren't easily kept and that dance took place in public.

And as a consequence of what was relatively a narrow debate within Washington, there was nonetheless the development of quite sophisticated public opinion that I would say a little less passionately but nonetheless I agree with what David just said, and that is the spirit of that, and that is moving forward, there's been a ground laid, the groundwork laid it hasn't been there and many other adventures around the world.

And so here's sort of I guess the hopeful scenario. Americans don't like to talk about foreign policy. We know that. They hate it. What they like to think about is there is there world. They'd like to think about the price potato chips. And they like to think about whether their kids have good schools and the rest.

And this shows up in public opinion all the time. And in fact the Pew Center for the research on the people in the press asked in October likely voters a bunch of questions. They actually asked them two questions that got a lot of attention. One was what is the thing that you've been talking about the most in terms of national politics? And the thing they've been talking about the most was Iraq.

In fact, along the long list that we all know of issues that one could talk about in September and October, they were talking about Iraq, more than half. More than terrorism, more than the economy, more than Enron, more than anything else. Then they were asked, well, what would you like to talk about? And it wasn't Iraq, not surprisingly.

It was the economy. It was terrorism. It was education. And it was the rest. Now, a number of my friends, my liberal Democratic friends, have taken this news as being really horrible, and as evidence actually that politics isn't working in America. The evidence is this. That Americans really want to be talking about the sorry state of the economy. And it's a pretty sorry state of the economy.

In any other midterm election we would expect the Republicans to be getting hammered right now because of the poor state of the economy. And we would not be wondering right now whether Republicans are going to-- whether the Democrats could possibly pick up seats in the Senate or the House. We would just be assuming it. But things are really, really different right now. OK?

So Americans want to talk about the economy. But they've been led to talk about Iraq. Well I think it's a great thing they've been led to talk about Iraq quite frankly. And, I think it's a great thing that we have a press that has figured out in Washington what the important issue is.

So while it is a sad thing, putting on my liberal Democratic hat, to think that we're coming into a midterm in which the poor economic performance cannot be an issue and in which we cannot blast the incumbent President for that, nonetheless the press was focused on-- rather the people were focused on Iraq in September and October and the reason they were focused on Iraq was it was a drama going on in Washington, as bad a drama as it was.

And that drama was over whether Delay and Armey and, actually not Delay, but Armey and all those guys would come along and support the president. In the end they did. And in the process, the public developed a really kind of interesting public opinion. And it certainly isn't a fully formed public opinion. It is going to emerge even further.

So at the beginning of September, most Americans believed we should go to war against Iraq. We should do it now and we should do it without any the world coming along with us. By the time the resolution was passed in the beginning of October, roughly the same number of people said we should go to war with Iraq. But most Americans said we should go only when our allies are with us, only when the UN is with us, and only as a last resort. They did not believe that a month ago.

So somehow there's a very interesting message got into that craniums or most Americans who mostly want to think about the prices in the grocery stores and kids' education. They actually developed a pretty sophisticated view on the situation in Iraq. So the responsibility of the press is multifaceted in a time of war. And I think that a lot of times, we focus on issues of secrecy, of the denial of civil liberties and the rest.